REVIEW: 'Dance for $9.99' at Hamlin Park Fieldhouse

The spirit of summer fun — serious fun, defying expectations — rules "Dance for $9.99/D49." Produced by the Energizer bunny of local dance, the 41-year-old Chicago Moving Company, this second incarnation of the two-day festival again includes 12 curated works, six per night; Friday's lineup is entirely different from opening night.

Though the emphasis on "new faces" in "D49" can mean a lack of experience, dancer Josh Anderson and actor-writer Brian Rad used that to their advantage in the fresh, hilarious duet "Levels of Acetylcholine." Both deliver Rad's texts, both dance, as they mine the comic potential of anger ignited by modern life, concluding with the section "Welcome to XFINITY." Anderson's choreography is rough, simple, efficient — especially when Rad repeatedly jumps him in "Casual Friday," a child of TV's "The Office."

Jason Torres Hancock may be new to Chicago, but he's been making dance theater for 12 years. His brainy quartet, "If I Told Her: A Portrait," is a love letter to Gertrude Stein, whose readings of her work form the sound design. Like her writing, Hancock's piece can be simultaneously funny and devastating, especially to the robotically repeated words "dead ones." Like Stein, Hancock exploits the rhythmic accumulation of details to produce a whole greater than its parts. A structured improvisation, "If I Told Her" celebrates the individual, especially its unique dancers.

Joanna Furnans' duet "bang bang" conjures magic from an unlikely source: unison choreography that repeats over and over, with just a few additions, while a 1966 pop recording plays … four times. But Nancy Sinatra's poignant rendition of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" emphasizes the emotional violence of the song's enforced, doomed relationship. Meanwhile, riffing on a long tradition of dance bringing inanimate objects to life, Furnans and Aaron Mattocks move cleanly through a doll's simple articulations, their eyes on us, never touching each other. Somehow their entrapment comes to seem enchanted, moving.

Jose A. Luis' solo "Nosotros" is very much a young person's dance about the all-encompassing importance of finding a partner. A shaft of light stands in for the object of desire, and though Luis is an engaging performer, his choreography is monochromatic. Maggie Bouffard's sextet "Selfie Esteem: A Fancy Deterioration" is undone by its explicit title, movement and spoken texts. It doesn't go anywhere from there.